Myrmecobius fasciatu

I recently paid a pound for a remaindered book entitled "Japanese Studies" - rather than being a general guide to any particular aspect of the language, examination proves it to be a collection of "papers presented at a colloquium at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 14-16 September 1988". The colloquium was set up by the British Library and the contents cover a fascinating range of issues relating to the collection of Japanese books. Some of these are particular to the time and place; studies on the collecting habits of European libraries following a general 1980s recognition that Europe rather lacked in scholars of Japanese. Some papers deal with the physical aspects of fifteenth century manuscripts, some on the methods of cataloguing texts in non-European languages in a way that computers can understand (CJK cataloguing having only been "tested" in the British Library at this point).

Here's some trivia from the book that I found intriguing:

"J R Black was born in 1827 in Scotland and educated there. In 1854 he arrived in Adelaide Australia on the barque Irene with his wife and a female servant. In 1858 his son Henry was born in Adelaide. After several failed business ventures in Australia James Senior took his family to Japan in the 1860s. The exact date is not known as different sources give the arrival date as 1862, 1863 and 1864. By 1865 James was editor of the Japan Herald. In 1867 his second son James Reddie Black II was born and in 1869 his daughter Elizabeth Pauline followed. In 1870 he published the first number of The Far East one of the oldest English-language newspapers in Japan, issued in 1866. In 1876 his wife took his first son to England to be educated and James went to Shanghai. In 1879 he returned to Yokohama in ill health and died in June 1880 and was buried in the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery. James Black is remembered for his contribution to journalism in Japan, especially in the introduction of the editorial into Japanese journalism in 1866. The file [from the Harold S Williams collection held at the National Library of Australia] contains details of the mariage of J R Black II and the death of his mother, the subsequent history of J R Black II and his presidency of the Kobe Club but perhaps the most interesting part of the file is that devoted to Henry James Black, the son born in Adelaide who became a traditional Japanese storyteller, took a Japanese name, Ishii Buraku, married a Japanese wife, was adopted by her family and died in Tokyo in 1923. The file describes some of Henry's performances one of which depicted the night-time streets cries of the Tofu man, the Soba man, the blind masseur with his flute, the fish vendor, etc."

["Australia and Japan - the Harold S Williams collection". Pauline Haldane, Asian Collections, National Library of Australia]

The collection has also corrected a long-standing misconception of mine. I once knew a person of Brazilian (i.e. Portuguese-speaking) background called Santos, and one day when I walking around Nagasaki I found a street called Santos-dori (サントス通り). Knowing the history of missionary activity in the area, I guessed that this street had been named after a priest called Santos. As Nagasaki is perhaps the most Western of all Japanese cities, this seemed pretty likely to me (most Japanese cities do not even name their streets). It now seems far more likely that the street is named after Sanctos, which I think is Latin for 'sacred'. Between 1590 and 1614, missionary literature (Kirishitan-ban) was produced - the first books ever printed with movable type in Japan. One of these was a translation into romaji by two Japanese Christians, and was called Sanctos no gosagueo no uchi nuqigaqi (サントスの御作Xのうち抜書). (X representing a kanji I must have once known: four strokes above a horizontal, under which is the Yen sign and then 木 - help! The whole is rendered much more inpressively in the original as SANCTOS NOGOSAGVEONO VCHINUQIGAQI.)

["The Japanese collection in the Bodleian Library". Izumi K Tytler, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Ms Tytler goes on to point out that the Bodleian collection has been greatly assisted by grants from a major corporation ("the establishment of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies") and a shall we say unusual politico-religious group ("a recent major donation is the benefaction made twice by the Soka Gakkai International and amounting to 3,300 volumes, which has enabled the library to strengthen its holdings in various fields, including Buddhism, philosophy, history, and literature"). Love the use of the Oxford comma there!)]

"We are also the proud owners of a set of Meiji zenki sangyou hattatsu-shi shiryou in some 950 volumes. Everything after volume ten is a supplement and the whole still lacks an index so it is hardly, if ever, used. It is hoped to persuade someone in Japan to undertake the compilation of one so that this wealth of material does not remain the yellow-bound white elephant it is at present."

["A note on the Japanese collection of SOAS". Brian Hickman, School of Oriental and African Studies. Apart from guessing that zenki is an archaic rendering of denki, I have no idea what this 950-volume is about.]

"The library collection is, as one might expect, strong in social sciences material and books published since the 1950s. [...] Major series held include Meiji zenki sangyou hattatsu-shi shiryou and Nihon gaikou monjo."

[Resources for Japanese Studies in the Centre for Japanese Studies Library, the University of Sheffield". Valerie R Hamilton, Centre for Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield]

"In the early 1890s Western art, particularly oil painting, was enjoying a resurgence of popular interest. The first wave of enthusiasm had been in the 1870s, culminating in the establishment of the Technical Art School in 1876 where the Italian painter Antonio Fontanesi taught the basics of Barbizon painting. There followed a sharp reaction against Western style art in the 1880s, with the beginnings of the Nihonga 日本画 movement and the widespread renaissance of Nanga 南画 painting. [...] By 1896, however, the times had changed [...] For at least two decades the Western style artists of Japan were loosely divided into groups: those associated with Asai Chuu and Koyama Shoutarou who had studied Barbizon style painting in the 1870s at the Technical Art School and those associated with Kuroda [Seiki] and Kume [Keiichirou] who had studied in Europe in the Impressionist-influenced plein-air style.

"The colour purple became a focus of controversy which had an indirect influence on the books which are to feature in these notes. Raphael Collin had taught Kuroda and Kume to use purple pigments for shadow effects, a striking contrast to the somber browns Fontanesi had taught. 'Purple' and 'brown' became buzz words in the Japanese art world, denoting 'new' and 'old' approaches to oil painting."

["Shasei ryokou (写生旅行) and the 'sketch tour' books of the early twentieth century". Scott Johnson, Kansai University, Osaka]

And this blast from 1988:

"The use of electronic media is, however, hampered by the fact that Japanese texts contain many thousands of different characters, which, with their complicated pattern, require a huge pattern memory, a high resolution screen and consequently a high resolution dot printer for output. In recent years due to the progress in VLSI design, cheap Japanese word processors have appeared. Even so, the input of kanji texts into the computer will always be more expensive than that of alphabetic scripts."

["Computerised information sources in Japan for academic studies". Ulrich Wattenberg, German Society for Information and Documentation, Tokyo]

Taeniopygia guttata

I am currently on page 1061 of Infinite Jest, which is not very far in at all (I'm buried in an eight-page, 8pt back-of-the-book footnote (Note 304), which has followed on from a one-line subsection (Note 39b) referent of Note 39 proper, spinning off page 89, which is I suppose where I properly am.

And while I find this incredibly fun (in a way, it's like a neverending cascading of concepts inside concepts (speaking of which, I'm not sure whether this was seen as revolutionary when Infinite Jest was first published (1996) or if, as I feel, it was seen as a formal literary version of the sort of games children's books would play (I would always run out of fingers marking the different paths I'd taken in Choose Your Own Adventure books))) there is something about it that doesn't lend itself to reading in the doctor's waiting room.

I went there straight after work, thinking I could get some study done in the hour or so before my appointment. Unfortunately a small girl with a beautiful smile was busy running back and forth across the waiting room and shouting with the glee of childhood. This was nice, but I was trying to infer the verb conjugation-form of the なあ ending ("to state one's feeling emphatically") when the example given was only the たいなあ form ("to state one's wish emotively", viz.:

一度南極へ行きたいなあ。"I wish I could go to Antarctica just once."

So I pulled Infinite Jest out of my bag (no small feat in itself) and thus bring you to the point of the post. Mea maxima culpa, for my last post's suggestion that an Australian man of a certain age wouldn't have used the term "minor-leaguers". Less than 24 hours later, I was walking along the seafront and remembered the following lines from TISM's "The Back upon which Jezza Jumped":

The minor-leaguers, the average markers, the consistent second raters;

The stay at homers, the timid loners, the habitual masturbators;

The ugly girls, the amputees, the screaming mongoloid;

The senile old, the deformed young, the bladders that unwillingly void...

I was wrong.

But the connection between one of the stories in How We are Hungry and the very start of Infinite Jest lies here:

Jerry has an accent that sounds British but possesses the round vowels of an Australian. (Eggers, 150)

The coach, in a slight accent neither British nor Australian, is telling C.T. that the whole application-interface process, while usually just a pleasant formality, is probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for himself. (Wallace, 6)

As an Australian whose accent has never matched the stereotype, I think I know what Eggers and Wallace are saying here. That there would be gradations of accents in Australia, whether geographic or cultural, based on class or local demography of immigrants, is not so much denied or unknown or unworthy of even being speculated upon; it is in fact that the non-Australian reader, on being introduced to an Australian character, needs to be told that this one isn't the guy you're thinking of.

I have no doubt that the Wallace's tennis coach character is Australian, even though the text doesn't state it directly. And I know it from a brilliant line of wipe-your-glosses genius that follows thereafter. Hal interlocks his fingers "into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X."

His own fingers look like they mate as my own four-X series dissolves and I hold tight to the sides of my chair. (Wallace, 6)

It takes another eight pages before Coach White refers to someone as "mate".

Anyway I didn't get very far through Note 304 (which is a fantastic, horrific description of an incredibly violent pastime reminiscent of the sport-based society of Georges Perec's W) before the doctor was able to see me, and I went upstairs to see her, and the long and short of it is that despite being accidentally hit quite hard in the groin three weeks ago by a tennis ball, the cremasteric muscle is undamaged and the bruising is only painful (as opposed to painful and worrying).

Bettongia penicillata

Sorry, I overslept.

Yesterday I got nine books from the library, florid with the hope of finishing them all within the alloted three weeks, and with the effort of carrying them home.

I read two of the smaller books first: "Eddie Krumble is The Clapper" by Dito Montiel, and "How We are Hungry" by Dave Eggers. You will note, either now or after your Google search, that these are both modern American literature of the recently-fashionable and even-more-recently unfashionable Probably Has A Name But I Don't Know It school. I like reading American literature because it underscores how very wrong I've got the United States.

Until I was about 20, I thought I knew the USA well. I had a diet of largely American television as a child, which allowed me learn my state capitals, and American math primers ("math" "primers" indeed) which taught me to subtract a liter from a quart gallon in over-large san-serif fonts. But then I visited the US, and realised not all accents made it onto TV, and people also tended not to live upstairs from friendly Muppets.

"Eddie Krumble is The Clapper" is an awful, terrible novel requiring of the reader

- about 75 to 90 minutes

It also begins with a "my life was nothing special until six months ago" moment before plunging back to the story proper. When the story ends with the "well, that sure wrapped up nicely" moment (six months later, remember?) he is somehow married to the girl and they have several children.

"How We are Hungry" was an improvement, but featured many, many stories in which Americans travel to non-Western countries and sweat wealth-guilt before having a moment of self-realisation in the final sentence which ends in some vocalised heart-in-mouth emotional expression like running through a goddamn stream in the wind! I quite liked this, actually. Especially the section where a dog translates a squirrel (critiquing the dogs' acrobatic endeavours) for the benefit of his human readers:

"the squirrels say other things, their eyes full of glee. "It makes me laugh that she did not make it across the gap." "I am very happy that he fell and seems to be in pain."

Unfortunately Eggers also wants us to believe a middle-aged Australian character would disparage a group with the term "minor-leaguers". I'll let this slide as the Australian was talking to an American, and because it ties into my next post.

I'm presently eighteen pages into the third book, "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace, which is probably going to take the full three weeks.

Ogmograptis scribula

I don't know what to call it, but my first encounter with it was in the TV ad for Diamond Chopsticks. The restaurant, which advertised extensively on Sydney television throughout the 1980s, wrote its name in roman letters composed of several wedge-shaped strokes to represent Chinese-looking writing. It resembles cuneiform script far more than it does Chinese; nevertheless this now seems to be the global standard for Chinese restaurants and for anything attempting an east-Asian look. To the six-year-old me, the strange gulf between the Chinese people who appeared in the ad and the Chinoiserie of the font used was far more jarring and noticeable than the, in retrospect, more bizarre use of Offenbach's galop infernal as background music (the accompanying lyrics were "Diamond Chopsticks, 6-8-4-1-double-4! Diamond Chopsticks, try some you'll be back for more!").

When attempting a little more authenticity, however, it is wise to check one's sources. Unless you are Brighton's listing magazine XYZ, in which case you will end up printing this on your cover and carpet bombing every shop in town with evidence you failed Year 7 Japanese.

At a local charity shop a week or two ago I happened to find an LP of Fiddler on the Roof making extensive use of a bastardised Hebrew version of English. Not too surprising, I suppose, but to go on and use this font on The King and I seems to indicate a level of ignorance that - oh all right - frankly doesn't surprise me.

Let's not even mention the poster for Borat.

Setonix brachyurus

I
My wife was giggling at someone's blog. I looked over; the site was called 日本語のできないダンナさま. I knew enough to feel embarrassed.
"You're too used to Windows," she said when I mentioned that I might ditch the laptop for a shiny MacBook like hers.
I am not too old to learn how to use a new operating system, but I am far too old to ever be comfortable with it.


II
"i like the idea of your mac, and am warming to jump ship to attack, but there is a story in the end of the first book of don quixote where two ships come up against each, moors versus christians and when the christians ramm the boat the narator jumps to attack the other ship but somehow his boat then veers off course and no one else joins him and he becomes a hostage/prisoner of the moors making him row their boats...this is a convulated metaphor for my frustrations/fears/anxieties of shifting from pc to mac for all those reasons unsighted above."
- Misha Kropotkin, Your Name Here


III
"Vhali, king of Algiers, a brave and bold pirate, having boarded and taken the Capitana galley of Malto, in which only three knights were left alive, and those desperately wounded, the galley of John Andrea Doria bore up to succour them: in this galley I was embarked with my company, and doing my duty on this occasion; I leaped into the enemy's galley, which getting loose from ours that intended to board the Algerine, my soldiers were hindered from following me, and I remained alone among a great number of enemies; whom not being able to resist; I was taken after having received several wounds; and as you have already heard, Vehali having escaped with all his squadron, I found myself his prisoner; and was the only afflicted man among so many joyful ones, and the only captive among so many free..."
- The Captive, Don Quixote


IV



"I am not too old to learn how to use a new operating system, but I am far too old to ever be comfortable with it." If only learning Mac OS was as fun as learning hangul or Arabic.

Varanus tristis

Chlamydosaurus kingii

...and I read books here and I read manuscripts in London, I went to the Royal Geographical Society, I went to Rhodes House. I had a marvellous experience at Rhodes House. This woman says, "Welcome, Mr Cathcart, it's very nice to have you here. You'll find the catalogue is quite self-explanatory." So I go out to the catalogue, and after 20 minutes I can't find anything. And I come back and I say, "Look, I'm awfully sorry, but I just can't find anything in the catalogue about Australia." And she said, "Oh yes, it's under 'Non-Africana'."

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